Tim Harford: why we fail to prepare for disasters
Financial Times, April 16, 2020
... Psychologists describe this inaction in the face of danger as normalcy bias or negative panic. In the face of catastrophe, from the destruction of Pompeii in AD79 to the September 11 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, people have often been slow to recognise the danger and confused about how to respond. So they do nothing, until it is too late.
Part of the problem may simply be that we get our cues from others. In a famous experiment conducted in the late 1960s, the psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley pumped smoke into a room in which their subjects were filling in a questionnaire.
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The virus started to feel real to Europeans only when Europeans were suffering. Logically, it was always clear that the disease could strike middle-class people who enjoy skiing holidays in Italy; emotionally, we seemed unable to grasp that fact until it was too late.
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Finally, there’s our seemingly limitless capacity for wishful thinking. In a complex world, we are surrounded by contradictory clues and differing opinions.
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What if we’re thinking about this the wrong way? What if instead of seeing Sars as the warning for Covid-19, we should see Covid-19 itself as the warning?
Next time, will we be better prepared?
The dynamics of failed disaster preparedness and response, through the lenses of COVID-19, Hurricane Katrina, and other calamities. Failures in vision, leadership, unheeded warnings, cognitive biases, social normalising.
Harfords wonderful but all-too-brief podcast, Cautionary Tales is highly recommended. Its first episode, featuring the work of Charles Perrow, and airing immediately after Perrow's death last November, especially.
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